It’s A Funnel, Not Rocket Science

Creating a sales funnel from opt-in page to profits is something many marketers struggle with. It’s not hard to get up a squeeze page to thank you page and drive some subscribers but that’s sadly where a majority of people stop. They’ll haphazardly send an un-targeted email out once in a while and wonder why their list of subscribers is slowly dying and not producing any income. We hope you have more than just a landing page and a few emails set up because a well designed and automated funnel can pay you daily.

Yesterday, Mark detailed the three simple steps to highly profitable sales funnels and showed how using White Label products can help build out your product funnel fast and build authority with your audience. Today I want to expand on the basic funnel set-up a little more and walk through some of the automation features and strategies we employ once someone opts-in to one of our lists.

Basic freebie list building works and it’s great to learn what I like to call foundation methods like setting up a squeeze page and redirecting traffic to an affiliate offer. This can work very well but takes some time finding the perfect affiliate offer and you aren’t building much authority if always sending your subscribers to affiliate offers where they are split again onto another list. In our training The Rebellious Affiliate, we teach how to start on your way to generating $100 a day with a basic two-step landing page and affiliate offer with some basic email follow ups.

What we teach in that guide is perfect for beginners or those needing to focus on what works to get started. Once you are consistently breaking even or profiting from your traffic and your email follow ups are making daily sales also, you’ll want to expand into your own products. This will build MUCH LARGER sales and authority when you sell a majority of your own products and occasionally an affiliate product 2-3 times a month.

Let’s walk through how we have our funnel set up. You can duplicate this in ANY niche and once you have it set up, you just need to drive traffic, free or paid and make small adjustments while you start making sales daily.

Step 1: Upsell/Tripwire/One Time Offer (OTO)

Yes, starting with our low priced product first and for good reason. A lot of marketers start with their opt-in page first and then try to find an affiliate offer to solve their subscribers problem. Instead, working backwards here you’ll figure out what niche problem you want to solve and then create a short training on that topic.

“One Problem, One Solution”

Don’t make it any more complicated than that if starting out. I’m sure you’ve bought products that tried to do 100 things and they just confused you more. Same here and when we first started selling products we kept them very simple and actionable. You’ll create a happier subscriber list, your refund requests will be nil, support will be a breeze and you are HELPING people.

Step 2: Landing Page/Opt-In Page/Freebie

Most beginners and even more experienced marketers get this part wrong also. Here I like to ‘shave off’ a piece of the Upsell Offer to give away as the opt-in freebie the new subscriber receives in exchange for giving us their email. We want them to be connected. This will lead to higher conversions on your paid offer that will move the subscriber from your freebie list to a buyers list. The goal of any list building email campaign. Yesterday Mark taught the entry point of the funnel being a paid product which works also but likely you’ll need affiliate traffic or traffic to sell people right away and put them onto your buyer’s list.

If you don’t want to go the affiliate route and sell yourself, it makes more sense to bring new subscribers onto a freebie list and then through email follow-ups, promote your Upsell/Tripwire/OTO. When you do it this way and are able to nail down your conversions from free subscriber to buyer, you can go out and spend, spend, spend on paid traffic. You’ll know exactly how much you can spend per click and still break even. Profit then comes from higher priced products that will continue to get promoted in your email follow-ups.

Step 3: Email Automation

There are two parts to the email automation equation. 1) Moving your subscribers ‘UP’ levels as they purchase products to higher price points 2) Adding follow up messages so you have at least 60 days of emails and continue to add a couple a week.

I know this sounds like working ‘in’ your business and not ‘on’ your business but once set up. You can forget about this part of your marketing funnel for the most part and just focus on sending traffic each day.

Going back to the first part, moving your subscribers ‘UP’ levels as they purchase products to higher price point. Any email autoresponder can do the basic functions of this. We use Infusionsoft but Aweber now has advanced automation tools built in and for a couple more options, ConvertKit and Ontraport round out the most popular and effective options.

Step 4: Traffic Automation

We can debate all day long about the virtues of FREE traffic vs PAID. We use a mix of both but the easiest and fastest way to profits is always paid traffic. Paid traffic makes up for slow periods in our free traffic methods and allows us to test different landing pages and elements of our funnels while the longer term game with free traffic continues to build each month.

The main traffic methods we use for free traffic are blogging and YouTube. Then we automate the content distribution and social media posting using IFTTT. Every time we post a new blog or publish a new YouTube video, it get’s distributed to all our social media properties being us traffic and back links. If you don’t have this automated yet, DO IT. It takes a couple hours setting up new accounts but once done, you won’t have to touch it again. This is pretty simple to figure out yourself but if you want an over the shoulder training, check out How To Automate Your Online Traffic, Authority & Exposure.

For paid traffic, RETARGETING is the way to go. It’s cheaper, highly targeted and very easy to achieve a positive ROI. People that visit our blog, opt-in to get a free training or buy a product are all added to different retargeting lists that we can cheaply and effectively stay infront of their minds using Facebook, YouTube and the Google Display Network. Retargeting allows us to pay 90% less versus creating new audiences. You can see our complete paid traffic strategy here in The Complete Retargeting Pixel Advertising Masterclass.

Step 5: Adding More Products

This is the MOST important step in our opinion. Traffic is easy, writing an email shouldn’t be something you worry about but most people get hung up on building out their product funnel that increases in price as the subscriber continues to buy. Something else special also happens when you STOP promoting affiliate products each week and move your subscriber base to only being exposed to your own products.

First, you become an authority. Subscribers aren’t joining your list to learn from you and then being told all the solutions are held by other marketers. When you promote more of your own products, the lifetime value (LTV) of each subscriber goes up. You can now spend more on paid traffic!

Secondly, you don’t have to chase affiliates. Instead of launching one-off products that are only getting sales for a week after launch, your products can now bring in daily sales since you are adding them to email followups and you’ll constantly have subscribers getting promoted your products each day instead of a month or more in between launches.

How to structure your product funnel?

As subscribers enter your funnel, they are presented with your front-end offer. This serves to move people who buy onto a ‘buyer’ email list which is more valuable then a list made up of people that have not bought from you yet. We have tested dozens of price points and $7 or $9.97 convert the same. There seems to be a mental barrier at $10 for PDF training so $9.97 is where we keep this. We have tested the $1 price point extensively and built a buyer list close to 1,000 $1 paid buyers but it doesn’t product the same income as a list of 1,000 $9.97 paid buyers. So if you are working with a $1 price point, consider moving the price line if the income on the back-end isn’t where you want it to be.

After a subscriber has bought a front-end offer, they are now a BUYER. You’ll always have subscribers that will continue to purchase at higher and higher price points so you are leaving money on the table if you don’t offer those products. From the $7-$9.97 initial offer we move up to the $17-$47 price point. This can be a mix of PDF and Video training or what sells especially HOT in the price range, software products.

Software feels ‘physical’ when being presented to purchase. It’s not just information but a tool that can help someone solve a niche problem. We’ve bought white label software in the past and are continually on the look out for products that not only we can use for the IM Rebels to reach our monthly goals but also software that we can add to our funnels at higher price points.

With products of your own, you can also add in a third traffic method, AFFILIATES. And with a higher price point, you don’t have to lose all income to affiliates. If priced over $17, go with 75% commissions and $27 or higher can go with 50% commissions.

Let’s Review…

Over the past two days, we’ve reviewed two simple funnel set ups that anyone can duplicate. At the VERY LEAST you need a front-end offer that you are using affiliate traffic to build a buyer list or a squeeze page that you are giving away something for free in exchange for email address and then selling your front-end offer via email follow ups. Once you have the basics set up continue to build up your available products for sale at higher price points using combination of PDF/Video training and software products.

Once this is set up and you have daily sales, you can scale up your paid traffic campaign as long as still breaking even on your front-end offer leaving your higher priced products as pure profit. To continue to grow? Continue to add more mid-ticket products, software and eventually coaching. For those that join your list and don’t buy your original front end offer, create more short PDF training’s that solve one problem and offer one solution. Not only can you sell these to your buyer lists but you’ll be moving subscribers from free to paid email lists making you more money in the long term as they buy higher priced products.

Any questions? Please ask in the comments and tomorrow we are going to take a look at a piece of white label software that we are adding into our funnels and to use ourselves on our websites.